rain was always plentiful and the paddy fields were always flooded. The villagers would carry the entire crop home and boil it in giant silver vats fitted with sieves to separate liquid from solid and meticulously collect the rice-water to be left out overnight to ferment. This was the only village whose crop was never sold to traders, because generation upon generation there washed their hair with the fermented rice-water, resulting in tresses silky and long enough to caress their ankles and that tourists from surrounding cities came to see. Charging these tourists money to photograph their Rapunzel hair was the primary source of income for the villagers. In gratitude, the villagers held an annual yajna in front of the sarpanch’s house, where fire burnt tall and long till rain was satisfied enough to come extinguish it.

rain became an obstacle when malls and low-rises sprang up and, with income from hair-tourism snowballing, goodies-laden trucks started streaming in to whet the increasing appetite of the villagers; these half-secured construction sites and haphazardly expanding roads often caved in after a sustained downpour. So the villagers cancelled the annual yajna, and rain took the hint and decided to focus her energies on settlements elsewhere and graced the village with only a fraction of her usual self, enough for a moderate rice harvest and enough to leave ornate algae hanging off the windowsills of the villagers who were busy adorning their Rapunzel tresses with bejeweled pins. But due to the resultant drop in availability of fermented rice-water, they could no longer follow through with their hair-wash routine. Their hair slowly started thinning out, falling off in piles around their homes and along the streets, and splintering into knotted ends due to which they all had to cut it such that it now reached only till their knees. This regression led to the crowd of tourists also thinning out, the stream of income drying up, and the unfettered consumption coming to a standstill. After being quoted unfeasible prices for borewells that would have helped make up the shortfall, the villagers resumed the annual yajna. But rain had by then wizened to their lack of fidelity and showered them with derision one last time before abandoning the village for good.

Subhravanu Das is an Indian writer living in Bhubaneswar. His work has been published in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, New Delta Review, and The Margins, among others, and included in Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf Top 50. More at subhravanudas.com.